Member Emery McClendon stands up to NAACP radicals

[Your Uncle Sam]

When in doubt,

the NAACP

cries ‘racism'

REAL CONSERVATIVES Member

Emery McClendon organized

Fort Wayne's first Tea Party Movement.

*******************

A column by Kevin Leininger

of The News-Sentinel

The way Emery McClendon sees it, the politics of perpetual grievance and victimhood have enslaved blacks like him more than anything since Jim Crow.

So when the nation's supposed civil-rights watchdog this week in effect branded him an "Uncle Tom," the 58-year-old FedEx driver and Air Force veteran wasn't about to retreat to the back of the rhetorical bus.

"The NAACP had good motives when it started, but it's dead wrong when it accuses the tea-party movement of being racist. It's all based on hearsay, not fact, but the NAACP is stuck in a rut and is trying to keep people mad to protect its power and money," said McClendon, who helped organize Fort Wayne's first rally in April 2009 and has been involved in several others since – none of which featured even a single racist incident, he insists.

But that didn't keep this week's annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from approving a resolution condemning racism among tea-party activists – a charge the 101-year-old organization justified by repeating unproven allegations that a handful of participants accosted members of the Congressional Black Caucus at a rally in March. If such actions happened, they are reprehensible – but don't tar the entire tea-party movement any more than racists within the civil-rights movement render the NAACP illegitimate.

These days, however, the absence of sufficient "diversity" is itself considered an indication of at least subconscious racism. McClendon acknowledges tea-party rallies are mostly white.

But does that mean blacks and other minorities don't care about patriotism, faithfulness to the Constitution and limiting the size and cost of government – common themes at the movement's events?

Not necessarily, McClendon said – which no doubt explains the method to the NAACP's madness.

"I have invited a lot of blacks (to rallies), and they usually refuse because of the race-baiting and because they have been misled. Many blacks are not aware of America's founding principles. They've been taught they came from slavery and that America owes them something. I was almost caught up in that myself.

"But America doesn't owe you anything. Free markets and capitalism offer the greatest opportunity. If you get an education and work, you will succeed. If you rely on the government, you will have only what it allows you to have."

If that sentiment prevailed, of course, a majority of politicians and special-interest groups would be out of business – which is precisely why its opponents must not only reject the message, but demonize the messengers. Do that long enough and some people will begin to believe it.

It won't work though, because most Americans, black and white, are mature enough to understand the difference between criticizing a president because his policies are wrong – and possibly even dangerous – and criticizing a president because he just happens to be black. Even white guilt has its limits.

"And most blacks really do understand what they have to do to advance," McClendon said, who has endured a litany of insults – from blacks, not whites – because of his conservative beliefs.

The cheap and cowardly tactic of using bogus charges of racism to silence dissent is hardly limited to the NAACP. It has become all too common, perhaps most ludicrously on display in objections to Arizona's perfectly sensible attempt to protect its citizens from people entering the country illegally. One of the groups that has condemned the state's new law as racist, oblivious to the irony, is the open-borders group called "La Raza."

That's Spanish for "The Race."

The left's increasingly goofy obsession with race may yield at least one benefit. Alarmed by the recent bombing during in South Africa – during the World Cup no less – President Obama this week condemned al-Qaeda for its recruitment of poor Africans as human bombers and its refusal to "regard African life as valuable in and of itself."

"In short," a White House official said, "al-Qaeda is a racist organization."

Coming from an administration that has refused to label almost anybody but right-wingers "terrorists," that kind of indignation has just got to be good for national security. Maybe the NAACP will get outraged, too, once it is done with those flag-waving, Constitution-spouting, One-Nation-Under-God tea partiers.

In the meantime, McClendon offered some good advice to blacks – and everybody else: "I say, investigate for yourself. Look at both sides. Go to the tea parties. We're all Americans. We bleed red, white and blue."

Not black and white.

[Emery McClendon]

NAACP is this racist?

[Richard Allan Jenni]

Like Emery, I am no longer a white American- neither a black American- neither brown, pink, green or any other color. I am simply an American. Neither do I care to be characterized as being rich or poor, from the North or South- or by any other divisive contrivance- except freedom-loving and God-fearing... RAJ

[Emery McClendon]

Thank You! Together we will preserve America.